Who killed the climate bills?

John F. Kennedy, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, once said that "victory has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan."

Not so climate change legislation, which has now failed in both the US Congress and the Australian Senate.

Both defeats can claim many parents: climate change skeptics, conservative politicians in opposition, well-funded lobbyists, vested interests in industry, the complexity of the proposed bills, the failure of international negotiations, and the complacency of ordinary citizens. All have conspired to defeat flawed but necessary attempts by progressive governments here and in America to combat rising fossil fuel emissions and the warming global temperatures they cause.

Close followers of Australian politics are of course well aware of the torturous and repeated failure of the Rudd Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in the Senate. After two efforts to get it up in 2009, the government gave up in April, marking the beginning of the end of Kevin Rudd's Prime Ministership. Since coming to power, Julia Gillard has promised a citizen's gabfest and a renewed effort to build consensus on the issue - but no price on carbon any time soon.

Across the Pacific, we've seen a similar story play out. Like Kevin Rudd and the ALP, Barack Obama and the Democrats listed climate change as a key plank of their policy platform that swept them to victory in the House, Senate and Presidency in November 2008. And despite a tough first term in which they had to battle a deep recession, two wars, a fractious media, angry Republicans and colourful Tea Party-goers, the Democrats were able to get the Waxman-Markey emissions trading bill through the House of Representatives.

But last week, faced by a hostile Senate and divisions within his own party, Senate majority leader Harry Reid effectively took the bill off the table, instead introducing a bill focused mainly on tougher safety standards for offshore oil exploration and ensuring that BP pays to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The bill leaves out any measures to introduce cap-and-trade, as it is called in the US, implement renewable energy standards or to limit US greenhouse gas emissions.

Green groups and the American left are predictably furious. In The New York Times, Lee Wasserman made some of the same criticisms we've seen made of Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong. Wasserman argues that Obama and his administration failed to make the case for action on climate change: "virtually the only public officials working to shape opinion on this over the past two years have been those committed to misrepresenting the science," he writes. Eric Pooley agrees. The author of The Climate War, a detailed account of the fight to implement cap-and-trade policies in the US, told Darren Samuelsohn at Politico that "the absence of direct, intense presidential leadership doomed this process."

It didn't help that many Democrats opposed the bill, perhaps worried about their electoral prospects this November. Senators like Missouri's Claire McCaskill and West Virginia's Jay Rockefeller were probably never going to vote for it, fearing the backlash in their coal-intensive home states. And one-time Republican allies like John McCain and Lisa Murkowski sniffed the wind of a visceral anti-climate change movement in the Republican right and back-pedalled rapidly on their support for limiting carbon emissions. The result is that US cap-and-trade legislation looks dead in the water.

But who is really to blame for the failure? In another hard-hitting column in The New York Times, liberal economist Paul Krugman makes the obvious point that we should "follow the money":

"The economy as a whole wouldn't be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries - above all, the coal and oil industries - would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines. Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you'll find that they're on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades."

The parallels to the Australian situation are all too apparent. Kevin Rudd and the ALP were elected a full12 months before Barack Obama, and the US debate has followed the Australian result almost in lock-stop. Just as in the US, climate change legislation initially enjoyed considerable momentum and electoral appeal; but faced with a rising tide of climate skepticism and a vicious anti-emissions trading campaign from industry groups, moderate Labor politicians took fright. At least the ALP can't be blamed for not having a go: the CPRS was voted down by the Senate twice, owing to Coalition opposition and Green intransigence.

The reasons for the defeat of emissions trading in the Senate have been raked over many times, most recently on Monday night in a lengthy discussion on the ABC's Q+A. With key players from all the parties involved in the Senate negotiations, there was room for blame to be shared around equally.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong blamed Tony Abbott and the other plotters in the Liberal Party for bringing down Malcolm Turnbull. Wong lamented the opposition of both the Coalition and the Greens to the CPRS, pointing to the "lesson of last year, where Malcolm and I had a deal and it was blown apart because Tony Abbott changed his position again."

Turnbull was in ebullient form, pointing out that Wong and the ALP had now walked away from their position on setting a carbon price, restating his commitment to an emissions trading scheme, and admitting that "I was very sorry that I was deposed as leader of the Liberal Party and my party took a different position."

Meanwhile, Graham Richardson made a very effective point about the Greens, which is that they could have voted for a price on carbon, and didn't. "If you'd voted the other way there would be an ETS in operation today," Richardson said. "There would be a price on carbon." As it turned out, Milne didn't get to explain just how lavish Labor's hand-outs to big polluters would have been. But Richardson is right: the Greens could have voted for a price on carbon. Instead, they held out for tougher targets and fewer free permits, and got nothing.

The Q+A debate on climate change shows why it will be so difficult to achieve consensus in climate change, as I've pointed out here before. Climate change is perhaps the perfect embodiment of the vested interests problem, particularly in modern democracies where wealthy lobby groups can gain easy access to politicians and the media through carefully orchestrated campaigns of misinformation.

As Machievelli wrote five hundred years ago, "there is nothing more difficult ... than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new." Nowhere has this been truer than in the climate change debate, where those with most to gain are not even born yet, and those with most to lose are some of the wealthiest and most ruthless industries on the planet.

No wonder seasoned observes such as The Australian's Paul Kelly are left to lament the timidity of an election campaign where "the dominance of party polling and safety-first campaigning has now corrupted even the leader's process of seeking an election mandate in the cause of policy belief."

Kelly thinks the era of reform may be over. In the short-term, at least, he's right.